I think that Hashimoto is using this project to iron out details that are left unaddressed due to convenience for other projects and the very low impact of any single issue Hashimoto has addressed. But much like with Apple projects, Hashimoto intends for the the end product to have greater value than the sum of the parts. Unlike Apple, it will be perfomant cross platform.
I think the only way to evaluate a project like this is to ignore the feature comparison charts and use it to see if it really is better when those details are addressed. I have a feeling that many people will agree and most will shrug their shoulders and not give it a second look if they even gave it a first one.
I’ll be trying Ghostty out soon. I hope it’s great. But I’m not expecting to be blown away.
These two are my favorite balance of fundamentals and getting to purposeful application as quickly as possible (the first link is definitely not enough, but combined with the second she should be comfortable with the syntax and able to get basic things working):
https://www.kaggle.com/learn/intro-to-programming
https://www.kaggle.com/learn/python
This one takes its time with fundamentals and includes some projects to put them in context of building something. It’s presented on Google Colab and Jupyter notebooks: https://allendowney.github.io/ThinkPython/
Working with GIS data means cleaning data. This one covers that and a lot of common analysis tools and techniques. But it assumes a bit of programming knowledge (Good to follow up after one of the options above: https://wesmckinney.com/book/